


Gatekeeper

by Jenshih_Blue



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Gen, Hell Fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-07-22
Updated: 2012-07-22
Packaged: 2017-11-10 10:56:55
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,442
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/465488
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Jenshih_Blue/pseuds/Jenshih_Blue
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>And when he lost his way he believed the gate had shut behind his humanity, yet the keeper of his soul lifted him up from the darkness.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Gatekeeper

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by the mega-talented multi-fandom artist trolleys' work.

Angels are the gatekeepers to the soul.

~Unknown

 

When he’d discovered himself in Hell, it was surreal.

Lilith, wearing Ruby’s skin, was his last clear memory as she had opened the doors allowing her vicious pets through to claim his soul. Sam’s screams had still echoed in his ears when he’d woke to the eerie green light and writhing shadows of another world. Suspended, his flesh pierced, and terrified beyond anything he’d imagined in his young life.

Hell had turned out to be exactly the way Meg had described it—a prison made of bone and flesh and blood and fear.

Even demons feared it and Dean was just human.

How long he’d dangled there in the darkness, flesh that he shouldn’t have had ripping away, and blood pouring from a body he no longer truly possessed he didn’t know. It was long enough that he pulled away into his own mind, a place he’d only been to once before—after his mother’s death.

“Oh, no, Dean can’t escape that easily my pretty.” A raspy voice whispered in his ear before his safe haven ripped away to reveal the true face of Hell. “You my boy are here to pay for your sins.”

That was the first time he laid eyes on Alastair. In the human world, demons did not possess anything resembling a human body, but here in Hell they could manipulate the sulfuric ether if they were powerful enough and Alastair was one of Hell’s best and brightest. The first face he wore was that of John Winchester, but not the John that Dean had known. This John wasn’t quite human, face rotting away to reveal bloody tissue and yellowed bone beneath. 

“You’re not him!” Dean growled as he struggled against the rack he was bound to.

A thousand human bones, interlaced, mummified flesh still clinging to some. It reminded Dean of something that Clive Barker would have conceived of in his dark world of tormented souls. As he watched, Alastair’s face had shifted, twisting in on itself until Dean stared into the face of his mother, Mary’s long golden hairs drifting around her gaunt and aged face on heated currents of air.

Dean shook his head, spitting blood at Alastair’s face. “You’re not her either.”

“True,” lips curled in a rictus of rotting flesh, Alastair shifted again. “So if mommy and daddy won’t frighten their precious baby hunter then maybe this will.”

Alastair’s true face was something that no human should ever witness, an abstract expressionistic vision of humanity's every nightmare. It writhed and hissed, flame and flesh slithering over bone aged and charred by the heat of damnation, skeletal smile, and rotting empty eye sockets piercing Dean’s skull. He’d gotten a glimpse of what a demon was before Lilith's pets had dragged his soul into the pit. It was beyond the human mind’s comprehension. Dean fought the fear and the hysteria as it rose in his throat bitter with the stench of sulfur.

“Scared yet?” Alastair chuckled through clacking teeth, serpent’s tongue darting out to lick at Dean’s face as he flinched, “Because it only gets worse from here on out.”

Dean opened his eyes and faced his fear, “Fuck you!”

“If you insist,” Alastair purred. 

#

Hours melted into days that bloomed into weeks and Dean held on with a fierceness he’d rarely shown in life. The pain was indescribable, elevated with each passing day. Soon months turned to years. He gnashed his teeth, cursed Alastair with every foul word he’d ever heard and some that he was damned sure he’d made up in the moment.

There were days, beaten into a bloody pulp, every tooth in his mouth shattered, he choked on his own blood. Some days Alastair peeled his skin off inch by inch until he was a quivering mass of bloody flesh, but he still held on. His anchor was Sam. His baby brother safe and sound, the one person he loved more than life, alive and breathing. All this pain and suffering was worth it to know that Sam was safe.

Each day Alastair would offer him a deal, but that vision of Sam gave him strength and hope. Every time the deal was offered he looked that demonic fucker in the eye and told him to shove his deal where the sun didn’t shine as he clung to that image of Sam—his Sammy.

Then one day it changed.

Alastair didn’t torture him. The bastard brought him to another place and showed him something that couldn’t be true. There in the pit was Sam, innocent and terrified, bound to an inverted cross of bone and blackened rock, stripped of his clothing, laid out as if he were the sacrificial lamb. The first few hours were the easiest because he could convince himself that it was an illusion. There was no way Alastair could have gotten his cruel claws into Sam, but as time passed, it grew harder to believe that.

Sam stared into his eyes, tears, and blood streaking his face, begging him to do something. With each desperate plea, Dean’s resolve crumbled just a bit more. Tears filled his eyes, vision blurred as they flayed the skin from Sam’s body, drove nails into his palms, and mocked him with a crown of daggers. Dean clenched his fists until the skin blanched across his knuckles, fingernails drawing blood in the heels of his hands, and he struggled against the heavy chains that held him to the wall.

“So, Dean, are you ready to deal? Or should I disembowel your precious brother?” Alastair pressed the tip of one clawed finger against Sam’s sternum drawing blood.

In that moment, everything Dean had been shattered. He couldn’t do it. He couldn’t watch Sam suffer anymore. “Let him go and I’ll do whatever needs to be done.”

Had he only known that at the gates, a battle had broken out as Uriel the Gatekeeper of Hell had flung the gates wide to his heavenly brethren. He watched with burning eyes as the soldiers of Heaven marched into Hell in search of a righteous man who had shed blood. Uriel smiled, an eerie tip of ethereal lips, knowing that his brothers and sisters were too late—Dean Winchester had already fallen.

 

#

 

Castiel was a foot soldier, first and foremost, a warrior of God. It wasn’t his job to question orders, but rather to follow them. As he and his brethren glided through the gates of hell on righteous wings, a strange thing happened to him. A knot formed inside him, something surreal, and unlike anything, he’d experienced before. After thousands of years of watching over humanity, now he was in the forefront of battle, a siege on Hell, and if he had not known better he would have believed it was fear he felt.

Hypnotized by the deep scarlet and orange of the ethereal walls separating Earth from Hell, Castiel dove downward on wings of silver gossamer, body arrowed toward the darkness. His eyes aglow with the power of the Lord as the colors darkened to blood red the closer he came to the core. Around him, his brothers and sisters began to glow brighter, wings leaving swirls of pure silver that sliced through the heat and flames of damnation, voices rising in a song of salvation.

Chosen to seek out the human soul, the righteous man, blood upon the floor of Hell, Castiel had sworn he would draw him out of the darkness. Time was of the essence for this soul he sought among so many was destined to open the first of the sixty-six seals. He was the lamb who would ignite the fire of the apocalypse. If he could not stop him from breaking the seal, then he must grasp him tight and lift him from perdition so he could halt what he had unknowingly began. Piercing the darkness, Castiel drifted on the sulfuric winds that swirled through Hell, his powerful gaze swept across the lakes of bubbling tar, the souls of the damned reached upward as his light caressed their tortured visages.

Save us…

Their pleas did not fall on deaf ears, but Castiel knew that each one suffered for their sins. He was not here to release them from their punishment. The presence of he and his brethren agitated them and then the demon soldiers came. They rose from jagged rock and pits of belching sulfur and fire, eyes black as the tar from which the damned cried out, and his brothers and sisters drew their swords their voices rising in a battle cry. He darted between them, his own strength, tearing demonic bodies apart as he searched for that one soul.

What Castiel found was grief and despair in the flickering flames of darkness. 

 

#

 

What had once been Dean Winchester, stood naked and drenched in the blood of the damned, his once beautiful green eyes now black the flames of Hell reflected in their obsidian depths. He vaguely recalled being something else, but only in a mist of what might have been dreams, although the damned did not sleep as humans did.

His grip tightened on his curved dagger, blood dripping from the blade as he slid it along the flesh of yet another soul. He took pleasure in the screams that echoed around him from the mouth of the soul pinned to the blood stained rack of bone. The blade bit deep into tortured flesh and he smiled, head cocked to the side watching as the soul writhed beneath the blades touch. The man reminded him of someone although whom he couldn’t say with his high cheekbones and almond eyes. It didn’t matter though. Alastair had left him to his work for the time being and he needed to do him proud.

Suddenly, a sound reached his ears that had nothing to do with the tortured soul before him and he lifted his dark gaze to what passed for a sky in this place. Streaks of silver cleaved the darkness and he frowned at the sight. Decades he’d been here, but never in that time had he seen such…

The sound rose again and his frown deepened for he could hear a voice this time within its folds. That voice seemed to call to him and that disturbed him on some level, enough that something flickered in the dark depths of his inhuman eyes.

Dean…Dean Winchester…

He took a deep breath, the taste of sulfur on the back of his tongue, and thought how familiar that name sounded. He shook his head, but the voice called out again, strong and alluring, and he knew, instinctually, that the lights above and the voice connected somehow.

Dean…Dean Winchester…

One of the multitude of lights, swept down and his dark eyes followed its path until it drifted down to hover in front of him. It appeared as a man, but he knew it wasn’t. The light that ebbed from its body hurt his eyes, burned them, yet there was no fire. Stretching from its back were wings made of strands of gossamer silk composed of the same light that flowed beneath its skin.

I am too late. Forgive me…

The creature’s face filled with something he recalled from those flickering images that haunted his every move. Sadness, he thought as he cocked his head studying this winged creature of light. His lips parted and words rolled out, his voice gritty from disuse, there was no use for speech here. “What are you?”

A warm breeze scented with jasmine surrounded him as the creature reached out hand pressed to his shoulder, fingers splayed. With his touch came pain, pain unlike anything he’d experienced before.

I am an angel of the Lord and you must come with me.

With the burning pain came the realization of who he had been, what he had done, and as he howled out his anguish the angel’s touch lifted him up and away from everything that he’d become. In his eyes the blackness swirled, the fires of hell reflected in its oily surface. As the darkness slid away, his human eyes, bloodshot, and filled with tears revealed themselves. What have I done? He wondered. All the memories flooded over him in rushing flood, voices, faces, and the emotions grew until his body felt aflame with their intensity.

“Sammy…” he croaked out between parched lips.

Soon, Dean, but for now sleep…

The angel’s voice soothed the pain and as his eyes began to droop he sighed, body going limp. Before exhaustion could claim him he spoke again, voice rough with the shadow of pain. “Do you have a name?”

Lifting his other hand above Dean’s bowed head, eyes aglow with heavenly light his voice reverberated through Dean’s body. The low hum of it cradled his soul as if he were a newborn in its mother’s arms and the last of the pain slipped away into the ether. Above them, the darkness began to lighten, a beam of soft gold, the darkness a deep scarlet at the light's edge and Dean felt himself rising up, light as air, and the rich scent of earth surrounding him. The blood of damnation slid away from his skin as they rose higher and clung to his feet desperate and sticky as tar.

My name matters not. When it is time, you shall know what you need. Now rest…

With those words, the light faded and Dean slipped into a deep sleep. Around them Castiel’s brothers and sisters gathered guarding his path as behind them the demons howled in anger. Castiel doubted the soldiers of hell were privy to what Alastair had done or that he was simply a tool for Lilith’s desires.

Soldiers were soldiers no matter which side they fought on.

Now though, Castiel was far more than he ever imagined he could be. His Father had believed that he held the strength to be a gatekeeper to the most important human soul outside of the Messiah. To be a gatekeeper was to hold the fate of the world in ones hands and Dean Winchester was that fate. Castiel gripped his charge tighter, passed through the gates of Hell into the human world, and out of perdition at last.

What came to pass was not for him to decide.

Much later after Dean awoke, reborn from the grave, he would come to realize that when he’d lost his way and he believed the gate had shut behind his humanity. Castiel, the keeper of his soul had lifted him up from the darkness. Perhaps even in Hell hope and salvation was possible.

~Finis~


End file.
